September

Tucked behind a nondescript door in the middle of a massive taproom renovation construction project is a small lab that looks like something out of a high-school chemistry class. Only instead of bunsen burners the equipment here — a vertical laminar flow hood, for instance — is designed to measure the consistency and quality of craft beer.

For some reason I am nervous, acutely aware that despite being a frequent craft beer drinker who might be found to say something annoying, like “I’m really into mosaic hops right now” at a party, when push comes to shove my sense of smell is lacking and after thousands of NEIPAs my taste memory of them has blurred into one inseparable tropically pillow of a beer whether or not they have been double dry hopped, brewed with lactose and conditioned on frit, or have citra, motueka, galaxy, or whatever hops in them.

Trevor Bland, LHBCo.’s quality control manager, hands me a spreadsheet-like form and asks me to try the five beers lined up on the table one at a time. “Taste them and record any thing that seems off with the color, aroma, mouthfeel, and flavor,” he says gesturing to the beers before me.

Trevor Bland taking samples for the lab off the tank

Suddenly, I’m a teenager wondering why I didn’t study harder for the SATs. At Lord Hobo Brewing Company, Sensory Panels like this one are a nearly daily occurrence for the brewers and staff to not only maintain and improve the consistency of the beers throughout the brewing process, but also help inform how the beers will taste by the time they get to the consumer. And, oh by the way, educate those at the brewery to better tell when something is off or not worth putting into market. Beers, after all, are a complex living product that can change over time.

Making beer consistently at scale is no easy feat

For breweries one of the biggest challenges is figuring out how and when it strategically makes sense to invest in quality control initiatives because the equipment and people required to do that effectively are no small investment. The American Society of Brewing Chemists suggests breweries can ramp up their investments overtime as they grow their volume of barrels produced.

“Our lab is growing into a lab that breweries our size aspire to have,” says Bland. “The [vertical laminar flow hood] is a huge step in the development of our lab,” he said, going on to describe how the VLF decreases the chances of false positives when testing the beer for microbes. It also provides great control over the cleanliness of the testing environment.

“It gives us a sigh of relief when we are propagating our yeast,” Bland added, noting the VLF “reduces our chance of contamination.”

For example, for breweries that produce 35,000 barrels per year or more — of which, Lord Hobo Brewing Co. is one of — should invest in things like a hydrometer, autoclave, and other equipment. Smaller breweries might only have a microscope and refrigerator while larger breweries have things like grist sieves or foam meters, for example. Bland says Lord Hobo is currently ahead of the ASBC suggestions in terms of lab equipment and has no plans of slowing that investment.

“The bigger we grow as a brewery, the more risk is involved when it comes to quality,” says Bland, who came to Lord Hobo over a year ago from Red Hook Brewing in Portsmouth, NH. He says the Quality Control Team tests beers vigorously at 60, 90, 120, and 160 days to hone in on the “cut-off point when a specific beer is no longer a Hobo beer.”

Sensory Panels

Which is how I found myself in a laboratory tasting beers to determine whether or not they taste good or like the beers I’ve come to know and love. While I’m far from a beer tasting expert — my language to describe aromas and flavors and mouth feels is, ironically enough, not well honed as it should be — I was able to acquit myself nicely.

I figured out that the first beer was not the beer I was supposedly tasting based on its color and flavor (Bland placed a beer in the wrong packaging to gauge how well his panelists avoid the power of perception); two of the five samples tasted like they should even if the aftertaste seemed slightly … unmellow; and another two samples were beginning to lose their flavors where they lacked the slightly bitter bite of the hops after the initial sip.

While I went into the sensory panel hoping to pass the test as I’d been trained to do from a lifetime of an educational system imploring me to do so, the point of the Quality Control Team’s sensory panel test is not necessarily getting the answers right. There are no right answers.

The point is for a brewery to collect the necessary data in order to deliver the best possible tasting experience to customers, which requires humans to taste beer and do their best to explain how or why the sample beer is the same or different than the baseline so brewing and packaging processes can be tweaked and fixed.

Unless a brewery is selling directly to consumers then it stands to reason the beer brewed will go from brewery to distributor to retail before reaching the customer. It’s a lot of steps where things can potentially go wrong, says Bland. But, there also needs to be a commitment to continually improving quality before the beer leaves the brewery, Bland adds.

That means ensuring the canning line is optimized for fill heights and dissolved oxygen, which is why Lord Hobo invested in Krones canning line, for example. Another piece of equipment Lord Hobo recently invested in is a QTA from Eurofins — one of only a handful of breweries in the US to do so, according to the company. The QTA is essentially an alcolyzer that takes half the time to do its analysis, which ranges from the original gravity or sugars in the wort to the ABV, real degree of fermentation, final gravity, and bitterness in the finished product .

“It’s a really cool piece of technology that cuts analysis time down ten-fold, all with just a drop of beer,” says Bland.

For Bland and his team, it’s not about purchasing the fanciest equipment or checking a box, however. It means having a process for reviewing every tiny detail of the brewing process and operations and coming up with strategies to improve all of it.

“These challenges won’t be overcome in a day but by building a culture to stay ahead of the curve,” he adds, noting that the brewery has come a long way in just three years but there’s always more work to be done, especially to get to the level of older, more established breweries.

Being a beer judge is a lot of work. Fun and rewarding, sure, but work nonetheless. This year I have the privilege once again to join so many knowledgeable and respected brewers at the country’s largest beer judging competition, the Great American Beer Festival (GABF), held every year in Denver, Colorado.

Being a judge at GABF is no easy feat. Many judges at the competition are Certified Cicerones, a member of the Beer Judge Certification Program, or have extensive sensory analysis training. In addition to having the right background to effectively judge beers, to be accepted at GABF as a judge you also need three letters of recommendation speaking to your qualifications from existing judges.

Oh, and there’s a three-year waiting list before you even make it to the show.

Hi, my name is Frank. Nice to meet you.

In short, it’s difficult to even become a member of this group and the people who judge the competition take the responsibility very seriously. It’s both humbling and exciting.

Months before the start of GABF, I need to declare beers I am unable to judge due to conflicting interest. If Lord Hobo Brewing were entering beers into the competition, then I would have to excuse myself from those particular categories. Further, I have to prepare a list of the styles I know well versus the styles I don’t know well and include my preferred categories to judge.

Not including subcategories of beers, there are 102 different categories being judged at the 2018 GABF. Thousands of beers will be judged over the three day stretch and a medal won by a brewery in any category can go a long way to boosting its reputation.

This year, most eyes will be on the new Hazy IPA category. Some 700 beers were entered across three Hazy categories: Hazy IPA, Hazy Pale Ale, and Hazy Double IPA. It makes the first time in a decade-and-a-half that American-style IPA isn’t the category with the most entries.

The day before the competition the assignments are handed out. This is one of the more exciting days when I get to open my folder and see what I got. In the 2017 competition I judged four categories, including American-style Malt Liquor (yup … insert your own jokes here), and a category called Field Beer, which are “any beers incorporating vegetables as ﬂavor or carbohydrate adjuncts in either the mash, kettle, primary or secondary fermentation,” according to the Brewers Association.

So, how do beers get judged and go on to earn a lifetime of fame and fortune? For us judges, it’s more than just reading the style guide and seeing if a beer fits into it or is exemplary of the style. It’s also not based on personal preference. Of course, we read and re-read the guidelines for what’s allowed and not allowed but we also sit around a table discussing the style’s characteristics and nuances before any beer is even tasted.

Sequestered in a nearby hotel basement to do all this, stewards bring us the beers unmarked in plastic cups filled with about 1.5 ounces of beer. It’s a blind tasting format. Then, a round robin run-off takes place. Each round, the judges determine the top beers from a select group to move on to the next round. If you have a large category like Hazy IPA you might have a few tables of judges. Each round of tasting and judging narrows the field. This judging goes on all morning with multiple samples, re-pours, lively debate, palate cleansers consumed, and frequent trips to the bathroom.

Not actually Frank, obviously, but still a judge at GABF

We scribble notes to give back to the brewery about their beers and finally choose which samples are exceptional enough to move on to the next round until the three medal-worthy beers in a category eventually rise to the top.

When you’re judging a style you like it can feel like the best responsibility in the world, but it’s difficult if you get a style you are unfamiliar with or don’t particularly care for. That’s when you have to dig deep. And there’s a good chance that happens to all the judges at some point!

Three straight days of judging multiple beers over six sessions, while hitting the festival floor and events at night will end on Saturday morning where all the judges grab a beer of choice and a breakfast burrito, and watch the awards go out.

It does take some luck to get a medal, but it always takes skill. Only the best beers have a chance of winning a medal and seeing the joy on some brewers’ faces when they win is cool. This is no different than winning an Oscar or an Emmy. To be recognized by your peers is to validate all of the effort, ups, downs, and everything in between that happens when you start a brewery and embark on that craziest of dreams.

Frank Fermino is the production supervisor and brewer for LHBCo. He has previously brewed beer at Red Hook, John Harvard’s, and Coastal Extreme Brewing.